Clues to the puzzle
by turtleemojis
Summary: Sometimes, falling in love happens at a party. Or : the SalQueen college AU that no one asked for. Posted originally on Archive Of Our Own.


Lightning's first impression of the party is that there's too many people. His second impression is that it's really fucking humid in here, and going from the crisp evening temperature of early March to the combined heat of thirty bodies in a room—with another twenty surely meandering through the rest of the house—might be equivalent to entering one of the levels of hell. He's not sure which. Someone at the door draws an 'x' on the back of his right hand in Sharpie ( "It's just in case the cops show up, man", he says in response to his grimace ), and Bobby presses a five dollar bill into his left palm, giving him a look of absolute pity as Cal laces their fingers together.

"Please, promise me you'll take a fuckin' load off tonight. It's depressing to exist around you, dude. Seriously."

"Oh, sorry, I didn't realize my midlife crisis was killing the atmosphere."

"God, I really can't stand you. It's not a 'midlife crisis' when you're twenty and don't like your major."

"You never know-I might just be dead by forty."

"If we could only be so lucky." He flashes a broad smirk and braces a hand against his sternum, pushing with enough force that the other rocks back on his heels. Cal tugs on his arm and mumbles about seeing Brick on the oposited side of the room, and Bobby allows himself to be drawn steadily into the mass of people behind them, attention still on Lightning. "I mean it, drama queen. Have fun. Get drunk, kiss a girl – hell, kiss a boy. Just do something with yourself so you're not such a fucking downer all the time. We'll find you later."

He opens his mouth to retort, but the two of them are gone before he can even exhale, stumbling over each other and laughing as they disappear fully into the crowd. Lightning purses his lips together, and he runs a thumb over the currency curled in his hand. He thinks for a second about just pocketing it and going back to campus to grab a slice of pizza from the dining hall, but then he'd have to explain where he'd gone and where Bobby's money went, and that's a conversation he doesn't want to sit through, especially with so many weeks still left in the semester.

Christ, he wants nothing more than to get out of this school and never look back.

After a few seconds of lingering uselessly in the foyer, he beelines towards the jungle juice and gets a cup full of a purple liquid that smells like Gatorade and rubbing alcohol. He downs half of it in two swallows, and then heads for the basement, where live music can be heard crawling up the stairwell and through the gaps in the door frame.

* * *

The basement is worse than the first floor. It's a lot darker down here and the space isn't as crowded, but there's sound equipment over by the wall and a handful of cheap stage lights running up where the band is playing. Combined with so many people jumping and moving around, Lightning breaks a sweat just standing at the base of the steps. He's about to turn back and go third wheel with Bobby and Cal for the rest of the evening, but then he spots her, hovering near the trashcans and talking to who he can only presume is a friend. Her frame is slender and she's wearing a blue shirt paired with dark wash jeans, hair loose around her neck and swept over one shoulder. She laughs at something the other girl says, and the way her expression morphs into a look of unbridled joy makes his heart stutter.

As though she can sense him gawking, she turns her head to make eye contact through the crowd, one edge of her mouth still lilted up into a smile. McQueen isn't intoxicated enough to blame it on the alcohol, but something in the back of his mind takes that as invitation to approach, and he can't help but feel like a bit of a skeezeball the whole way across the room. If she looks indifferent about him coming over, her friend looks outright elated, and she makes space for him along the wall they're hugging.

"Hey."

"Hi."

"Lightning." He sticks out a hand for her to shake like the total moron he is and she doesn't take it, even when her companion swats at her bicep and shoots her a fevered look. Instead, she rakes her gaze over his body in a way that makes him feel uncomfortably exposed, and he shifts on his feet for a few seconds while his arm wilts back down to his side.

"Sally," she says at last, though he suspects it's only because the other girl keeps glaring daggers at her.

"Can I, uh – could I buy you a drink?"

"Yes," her friend—a petite little thing, dressed exclusively in purple with her brown hair in a ponytail—interjects for her, her voice so sudden and insistent that both of them flinch. "Yes, you can." Sally looks like she's about to argue, but not before she's shoved a few inches closer to Lightning, and she wheels around to glare at the smaller of the two.

He goes back to fidgeting.

"I mean, if you don't want to, that's fine, I can, uh—"

She looks away from their argument to stare at him, the lack of intensity behind her eyes giving the impression that she'd forgotten he was even there for a second, and her countenance morphs to a look of surrender. Sally sighs.

"Come on, Stickers." She picks at the raised edge of one of the Piston Cup patches on his jacket, and then strides ahead of him. "Lets go buy me a drink."

* * *

The living room doesn't have nearly as many people in it as he'd expected so they claim the loveseat for themselves, McQueen settled at one end with Sally at the other, a cup gripped tightly in her hands.

"What's your major, again?"

"Saying 'again' implies that you asked a first time, which you didn't. But, I'm a law student—senior." And she seems pretty damn pleased about it, too. Her hand raises so that she can take another deep pull from her beverage ( her third in as many minutes ), and he doesn't try to intervene. "Planning to move out west for graduate school next fall."

"And what comes after that?" He asks, solo balanced on the flat side of his knee and index tapping rhythmically—comfortingly—against the red plastic. Sally just shrugs.

"A job, hopefully. Not for the money, though. I want to get out there and make a real difference in the world, y'know?" He doesn't. "I mean, you—you do all these case studies, and you realize how of our legal system is so fundamentally flawed. And I know—I know I'm not the only one in this program who has some kinda…superhero complex, but I…I feel like I could be really good at fixing things, if I just got the chance." She gestures erratically with her free hand and then pauses for a moment before she starts to chuckle at her own musings, all her weight suddenly falling to McQueen's chest. She's warm, and her beverage has spilled over the sides on to her pants, and the lights strung around the living room make her look pink and soft at the edges.

Something in his stomach clenches.

As though sensing his distress, Sally tilts her head so that she can establish eye contact without needing to lean away from him ( has she always had that much blue around her pupils? ). Then she smiles.

"What do you think?"

"About what? Your five-year plan?"

"Sure."

"I…I wouldn't think that you'd care about my opinion."

"Oh, trust me, I normally wouldn't give half a shit—but you're at some dumb party on a Saturday night listening to me ramble about my ambitions, when there's probably a dozen other girls here who'd love to just have you breathe the same air as them. And that...means a lot to me, in my own stupid way, I guess."

Lightning blinks. Whatever's got his stomach in a vice grip tightens.

"…So, you seriously wanna hear what I have to say?"

"Hit me with your best shot, Stickers."

"…I think you're the kind of person who can accomplish whatever they set their mind to."

Sally doesn't reply.

* * *

A few minutes later she inquires about home, and he tells her how he's an only child, born and raised in Texas by two of the most painfully average people in the entire state, and how he's a sophomore mechanics major, and how he doesn't even really want to be here.

( "—At this school, I mean. I like being here, where we are, right now. It's nice. You're nice."

"Wow. Nothing says 'modern romance' like being flirted with on someone else's couch."

"Who's flirting?" )

When she questions why he's wasting so much time and money on a degree he doesn't want, he rolls his shoulders. She tries again, and asks what he'd rather be doing with his time. That must've the right topic to broach, because Lightning's entire face lights up in a way that—probably against her better judgment, given her sobriety—really makes Sally sort of want to kiss him right here, in this house that neither of them own, with God and fifty drunk twenty year olds as her witness. But she doesn't, and instead he talks about stock racing and the Piston Circuit, and names like Strip Weathers and Louise Nash and Junior Moon and The Fabulous Hudson Hornet. Actually, he talks a lot about The Fabulous Hudson Hornet.

By the time he's finished, he's grinning so wide that his face looks like it could split in two, and she can feel his heartbeat pounding beneath the soft fabric of his t-shirt. She must be gaping at him, because his chin tilts and his eyebrows furrow, and he only asks her, "What?" with the corners of his mouth still quirked up. She startles.

"Nothing! Nothing. It's just—you're passionate. It's good. Cute, even."

"Oh, so now who's being flirted with?"

"Do you ever shut up? Just wondering."

He leaves at some point to refill their drinks, and when he returns to the couch, she settles back against the flat of his chest as though this whole thing they're doing is normal. He asks where she's from, and she doesn't say much; only that she'd come all the way from California, and she doesn't get along with her parents, and she can't stand the town she grew up in.

He understands completely.

It's the first time in a while.

* * *

"Hey, Stickers."

"Mmmph."

"What are you thinking about?"

Lightning's head cants to the side, his cheek pressed atop her hair and free hand trailing the outside of her arm. She can't shift much with his weight leaning so heavily on her, but she knows his gaze is trained on her face, and the idea that he could only have eyes for her out of everyone at this party sends a tight pang through her chest. He grunts again. "How pretty you look right now. And how I might actually really like you, even though it's only been like…an hour. I know that shouldn't be enough time to really like someone, but you…you're good to sit with, a-and just … talk to."

Both Sally's eyebrows arch, and there's a blossoming of heat up her throat and into the hollows of her cheeks. She tries to set her face as best she can into an expression of stoicism, but it's harder than it should be. "Oh? Is that all?"

He doesn't say anything for a long minute, and even though he's almost assuredly way past tipsy, there's a tension in his silence that'd take her breath away, if she were sober enough to know what it meant. "I want…I think I want…to kiss you? Maybe. If that's okay. It's fine if it's not, my friends just told me I should kiss someone while we're here, because apparently, I suck. I don't know. I'm drunk. It's dumb."

"Oh."

"Yeah."

* * *

"Are you sorry you asked? Did I make you uncomfortable?"

"Not at all."

"Because I can go, if you want—"

"I don't—"

"—I should probably find my friends anyways and leave you alone—"

"—You don't have to—"

"—It's just I'm not really good with stuff like this, I feel like I crossed a line—"

"—Lightning."

* * *

She kisses him. She kisses him absolutely fucking stupid, there on that couch, in this house that neither of them own, with God and fifty other twenty year olds paying them no mind. He tastes like Gatorade ( the purple kind ) and rubbing alcohol, and she sees stars behind her eyes, a sensation like fire trailing from her mouth to the pit of her stomach where it pools and pools until it's setting the contents of her abdomen ablaze. He grabs at her waist to pull her closer and she almost falls into his lap, both arms wrapping securely around his neck. One of his hands leaves her shirt to trace the cut of her jaw, and he tilts his head to deepen the exchange, lips molding against each other as though they've done this a thousand times sober and not just once while smelling too strongly of vodka.

She pulls away and he chases her, chin angled and his mouth still parted, but she has the sense to stop him before he can get too close, heel of her hand pushing back on his shoulder. "I want to see you again," he says a few inches from her face, his timbre low and throaty and desperate, and Sally swallows hard.

"Do you mean that?"

"What?"

"Do you mean that. Like, do you actually want to see me again, or are you just saying that because you think it's the right thing to do? Because if you're only saying it to spare my feelings and make me feel better about myself and what we're doing here, I'd rather you just tell me so I don't get my hopes up waiting for you to call or show up at my dorm or—"

"Sally." His eyes are open and alert now, and there's an intensity in his irises ( hey, there's green around his pupil. green-blue and blue-green. yin and yang ) that makes her melt into his touch. "I mean that I want to see you again. I really like this, and I—I really like you, and I know you're done after this semester and then you're gonna go off and change the fucking world, but if I could just spend another day with you, that'd be—"

She kisses him again.

* * *

They make a date for next Thursday.


End file.
